The Complete Stories (61 page)

“Well then,” she said when he made no protest, "it is decided—till four. You will see that our Bruges is very beautiful, very
triste,
you understand French?
Bruges la Morte.
And German too maybe, a little?
Die tote Stadt.”
She pronounced this with a small shiver in her voice, a kind of silvery chill that made him think of the backs of mirrors. At the same time she gave him just the tips of her gloved fingers. “So—I must be off now. We meet at four.”

Which is how, without especially wanting it, he came to know the whole history of the town. On a cold afternoon in the Fifties, with fog swirling thick white in the polled avenues and lying in ghostly drifts above the canals, and the red-brick faades of palaces, convents, museums laid bare under the claws of ivy, he tramped with his guide over little humpbacked bridges, across sodden lawns, to see a window the size of a hand mirror with a bloody history, a group of torture instruments (themselves twisted now and flaking rust), the site, almost too ordinary, of a minor miracle, a courtyard where five old ladies were making lace with fingers as knobbled and misshapen as twigs, and the statue of a man in a frock coat who had given birth to the decimal system.

The woman's story he caught in the gaps between centuries and he got the two histories, her own and the city's, rather mixed, so that he could not recall later whether it was his lady or the daughter of a local duke who had suffered a fall in the woods, and her young man or some earlier one who had been shut up and tortured in one of the many towers. The building she pointed to as being the former Gestapo headquarters looked much like all the rest, though it might of course have been a late imitation.

She made light of things, including her own life, which had not, he gathered, been happy; but she could be serious as well as ironic. To see
what all this really was, she insisted—beyond the relics and the old-fashioned horrors and shows—you needed a passion for the everyday. That was how she put it. And for that, mere looking got you nowhere. “All you see then,” she told him, "is what catches the eye, the odd thing, the unusual. But to see what is common, that is the difficult thing, don't you think? For that we need imagination, and there is never enough of it—never, never enough.”

She had spoken with feeling, and now that it was over, her own small show, there was an awkwardness. It had grown dark. The night, a block of solid ice with herrings in it, deep blue, was being cranked down over the plain; you could hear it creaking. He stamped a little, puffing clouds of white, and shyly, sheepishly grinned. “Cold,” he sang, shuffling his feet, and when she laughed at the little dance he was doing he continued it, waving his arms about as well. Then they came, rather too quickly, to the end of his small show. She pulled at her gloves and stood waiting.

Something more was expected of him, he knew that. But what? Was he to name it? Should he perhaps, in spite of her earlier disclaimer, offer a tip? Was that it? Surely not. But money was just one of the things, here in Europe, that he hadn't got the hang of, the weight, the place, the meaning; one of the many—along with tones, looks, little movements of the hands and eyebrows, unspoken demands and the easy meeting of them—that more than galleries or torture chambers made up what he had come here to see, and to absorb too if he could manage it. He felt hopelessly young and raw. He ought to have known—he had known— from that invisible kick of the heels, that she had more to show him than this crumblingly haunted and picturesque corner of the past, where sadness, a mood of silvery reflection, had been turned into the high worship of death—a glory perhaps, but one that was too full of shadows to bear the sun. He felt suddenly a great wish for the sun in its full power as at home, and it burned up in him. He
was
the sun. It belonged to the world he had come from and to his youth.

The woman had taken his hand. “My dear friend,” she was saying, with that soft tremor in her voice, "—I
can
call you that, can't I? I feel that we
are
friends. In such a short time we have grown close. I would like to show you one thing more—very beautiful but not of the past. Something personal.”

She led him along the edge of the canal and out into a street broader
than the rest, its cobbles gleaming in the mist. Stone steps led up to classical porticoes, and in long, brightly lit windows there were Christmas decorations, holly with red ribbons, and bells powdered with frost. They came to a halt in front of one of the largest and brightest of these displays, and he wondered why. Still at the antipodes, deep in his dream of sunlight and youth, he did not see at first that they had arrived.

“There,” the woman was saying. She put her nose to the glass and there was a ring of fog.

The window was full of funerary objects: ornamental wreaths in iridescent enamel, candles of all sizes like organ pipes in carved and coloured wax, angels large and small, some in glass, some in plaster, some in honey-coloured wood in which you saw all the decades of growth; one of them was playing a lute; others had viols, pan pipes, primitive sidedrums; others again pointed a slender index finger as at a naughty child and were smiling in an ambiguous, un-otherworldly way. It was all so lively and colourful that he might have missed its meaning altogether without the coffin, which held a central place in the foreground and was tilted so that you saw the richness of the buttoned interior. Very comfortable it looked too—luxuriously inviting. Though the scene did not suggest repose. The heavy lid had been pushed strongly aside, as if what lay there just a moment ago had got up, shaken itself after long sleep, and gone striding off down the quay. The whole thing puzzled him. He wondered for a moment if she hadn't led him to the site of another and more recent miracle. But no.

“Such a coffin,” she was telling him softly, "I have ordered for myself. Oh, don't look surprised!—I am not planning to die so soon, not at all! I am paying it off. The same. Exactly.”

He swallowed, nodded, smiled, but was dismayed; he couldn't have been more so, or felt more exposed and naked, if she had climbed up into the window, among the plump and knowing angels, and got into the thing—lain right down on the buttoned blue satin, and with her skirt rucked up to show stockings rolled tight over snowy thighs, had crooked a finger and beckoned him with a leer to join her. He blushed for the grossness of the vision, which was all his own.

But his moment of incomprehension passed. His shock, he saw, was for an impropriety she took quite for granted and for an event that belonged, as she calmly surveyed it, to a world of exuberant and even
vulgar life. The window was the brightest thing she had shown him, the brightest thing he had seen all day, the most lively, least doleful.

So he survived the experience. They both did. And he was glad to recall years after, that when she smiled and touched his hand in token of their secret sympathy, a kind of grace had come over him and he did not start as he might have done; he was relieved of awkwardness, and was moved, for all his raw youth, by an emotion he could not have named, not then—for her, but also for himself—and which he would catch up with only later, when sufficient time had passed to make them of an age.

As they already were for a second, before she let him go, and in a burst of whitened breath said, "Now, my dear, dear friend, I will exact my fee. You may buy me a cup of chocolate at one of our excellent cafs. Okay?”

O
dd the conjunctions,
some of them closer than any planet, that govern a life. I am an only child because of my father's brother, Uncle Jake. In an otherwise exemplary line of seven brothers and sisters he made so sharp a detour, and so alarmed my mother with the statistical possibilities, that she refused, once my father's desire for an heir had been satisfied, to take further risks. She was not, needless to say, a gambler—even one chance was one too many—and she spent a good deal of her time watching for signs of delinquency in me. As the years passed and familiar features began to emerge, a nose from one side of the family, a tendency to bronchitis from the other, she grew more and more apprehensive, and was only mildly relieved when I came to resemble the plainest of her sisters.

A nose is obvious enough, it declares itself. So does a tendency to wheeze when the skies grow damp. But bad blood is a different matter. It takes a thousand forms and loves to disguise itself in meek and insidious qualities that allay suspicion and then endlessly and teasingly provoke it. My mother could never be sure of me. I was too quiet—it was unnatural. And Uncle Jake did leave his mark.

Was he really so bad?

Bad is hard to define. I am speaking of a time, the middle Thirties, and a place, Brisbane, in which it took very little in the way of divergence from the moderately acceptable for heads to come together and for a young person to get a reputation—and all reputations, of course, were bad.

There are crimes that defy judgment because they defy understanding. A mild-mannered newsagent shuts his shop one evening, goes out
to the woodpile where chooks are dealt with, takes an axe, sits for ten minutes or so listening to the sounds of the warm suburban night, then goes in and butchers his whole family, along with a child from next door who has come in for the serials. The law-courts do what they can, and so too, at a level where local history becomes folk-lore, do the newspapers; but horrors of this sort cannot be gathered back into the web of daily living, there is too much blood, too much darkness in them. We must assume the irruption among us of some other agency, a wild-haired fury that sets its hand on a man and shakes the daylights out of him, or a god in whom the rival aspects of creation and chaos are of equal importance and who knows no rule. But bad is civil; it is small-scale, commonplace—something the good citizen, under other circumstances, might himself have done and is qualified to condemn.

“Shadily genteel" is how a famous visitor once described our city, and she was not referring, I think, to its quaint weatherboard houses with their verandahs of iron lace or to the hoop-pines and glossy native figs that make it so richly, even oppressively green.

Brisbane is a city of strict conventions and many churches, but subtropical, steamy. Shoes in a cupboard grow mould in the wet months, and on the quiet surface of things there are bubbles that explode in the heat and give off odours of corruption; everything softens and rots. There are billiard-saloons and pubs where illegal bets can be laid on all the local and southern races, and there were, not long ago, houses in Margaret and Albert Streets in the City, and at Nott Street South Brisbane, that were tolerated by the civil authorities and patronised by a good part of the male population but which remained for all ordinary purposes unmentionable—and given the corrugated-iron walls with which they were surrounded, very nearly invisible as well. Brisbane is full of shabby institutions that society turns its gaze from, and in a good many of them my Uncle Jake was known to have a hand. Always flush with money and nattily dressed, he rode to the races in a Black and White cab with his friend Hector Grierley and could be seen on Saturday nights at the Grand Central, blowing his winnings in the company of ladies who smoked in public, painted their toenails, and wore silk. Uncle Jake wore his Akubra at an unserious angle and had a taste for two-toned shoes. Loud is what people called him, but I knew him only in his quieter moments.

He liked to come around while my mother was ironing, and would
stand for long hours telling her stories, trying to impress her (she was never impressed) and seeking her womanly advice.

She gave him the advice and he did not take it. It always ran clear against his nature, or interfered, just at the moment, with some scheme he had in hand. My mother made a face that “See, I knew it—why did you ask?”

She didn't dislike Uncle Jake. Quite the contrary. But she was afraid of his influence and she resented his idleness, his charm, his showy clothes, and the demands he made on my father. The youngest of my grandmother's children, he was also, for all the sorrow he had caused, her favourite, and it was the bad example, which even my father followed, of forgiving him every delinquency in the light of his plain good nature that my mother deplored. It seemed monstrous to her that on at least one occasion, when the police were involved, my steady, law-abiding father had had to go to a politician, and the politician to an inspector of police, to save Uncle Jake from his just deserts.

It hadn't always been so. As a very young man he had been an apprentice pastrycook. His paleness, the white cap and apron he wore, and the dusting of flour on his bare arms, had given him the look of a modest youth with a trade whose very domestic associations made him harmless or tame. He was cheeky, that's all; a good-natured fellow who liked a drink or two and was full of animal spirits, but in no way dangerous. He deceived several girls that way and some married women as well, and got the first of his reputations.

But people ignored it. He was so likeable, so full of fun, such a ready spender, and so ready as well to share his adventures in the stories he told, which were all old jokes remade and brought back into the realm of actuality. Then, at not much more than twenty, he fell in love. The girl was called Alice—she was two years older—and with rather a sheepish look before his mates (he was, after all, betraying the spirit of his own stories), he married her.

The girl's beauty made a great impression on everyone. She had the creamy blonde look that appealed to people in those days—big green eyes, a thinned-out arch of eyebrow, hair that hugged her head in a close cap then broke in tight little curls. Uncle Jake was crazy about her. He worked at the hot ovens all night and brought home from the bakery each morning a packet of fresh breakfast rolls that they ate in bed, and
he made her cakes as well in the shape of frogs with open mouths, and piglets and hedgehogs. They were happy for a time, only they didn't know how to manage. The girl couldn't cook or sew and was reluctant to do housework, and Uncle Jake was ashamed to be found so often with his sleeves rolled up, washing dishes at the sink. He had always, himself, been such a clean fellow, such a neat and careful dresser. He couldn't bear dirt. They had house after house, moving on when the mess got too much for them.